REASON, EMOTION, and HUMAN ERROR

About the Book

The study of history leads to the obvious conclusion that humans have often succeeded when reason was able to prevail over destructive emotion, and routinely failed when it could not. The several following propositions that derive from that observation are samples from Reason, Emotion, and Human Error: It will always be emotionally more appealing to hope a problem will go away with the fecklessness of a Neville Chamberlain, than to confront it with the courage of a Winston Churchill. History has shown the consequences of appeasement often to have been ultimately more, not fewer casualties. Destructive envy undoubtedly accounts for much of the negative correlation of socio-economic status with violent crime. It may not be too much of a stretch to wonder if an emotional need for power could account for the violent behavior of some (typically males) who are unwilling or unable to achieve the status to which they aspire by more rational means. Costly consequences often follow when huge potential losses or gains are associated with very small probabilities, because errors in reckoning those probabilities can result in awful decisions. Those errors are typically driven by emotion. Admission policies that deny better qualified applicants in order to admit less qualified ones always favor some who are deemed more deserving only by arbitrary emotional criteria, but one unintended consequence of that manifestly biased policy must always be to turn away those who are more deserving by more relevant rational criteria. Knowing that some of their intended victims or bystanders might be armed would likely deter many perpetrators from committing crimes. It would surely deter them from using deadly weapons in the commission of violent crimes. There exists overwhelming research evidence that early childhood experience is critically important for the development of moral character. These propositions are some of the logical inferences from that well established principle that are found in Reason, Emotion, and Human Error: All things considered, a mother and father, living together and loving and respecting each other, bring to their family enterprise a complete repertoire of all the competencies needed for the successful rearing of their offspring, something neither would be fully capable of doing alone. A mother’s inherent love for her infant provides more than enough pleasure to make the cost of giving birth and caring for him worthwhile. She rears her offspring for his benefit of course, but only because she is well paid for her effort in a currency only she can fully appreciate. Moreover many mothers will testify that, regardless of its exceedingly high cost, the transaction is nonetheless a bargain. The necessarily extensive period of care required by human infants demands a huge expenditure of energy that would not likely be delivered if it were not for a commensurately strong emotional bond between a human mother and her newborn that motivates her to provide that care, and then rewards her for having provided it. A correlation can be found between the degradation of the care many parents provide their infants and young children, and the deficit in moral character found in the following generations of adults. Freedom from constraint by a remote government would characterize the natural political and economic environments that shaped human nature during its evolution, but that lack of constraint would have been more than offset by the intense social pressure of genetically similar members of a clan. The system that comes closest to that arrangement today would be libertarianism. Libertarians believe that everyone should be free to do whatever they choose, provided that in the exercise of their freedom, they don´t infringe on the corresponding freedom of anyone else. The validity of that libertarian principle derives not so much from the individual freedom it asserts, as from the respect for the freedom of a

About the Author

Your author was blessed with the most thoughtful and loving child care imaginable and educated by well-qualified teachers in excellent schools, so whatever are his deficits, his background doesn’t account for them. He practiced an unlikely combination of professions: chemical engineering and educational psychology, before retiring, making many incredibly stupid mistakes along the way, but obediently learning important lessons therefrom, as his father had advised him always to do. So he is eminently well qualified as an expert on human error, bringing as he does the experience of a lifetime of major blunders in addition to scholarship to his work.